This is your space and it needs your attention, we have to organize surplus/supplies, clean, build storage, identify items we still need to acquire and throw out some junk.

If you cannot make it Saturday, you as members, can access the space any time you want. Help by sweeping the shop floor, setting up PCs with Ubuntu for our lab, clean a fridge, sort the donations near the supply area, build storage for tools, surplus, stock.

A couple hours makes a dent, and it helps us show off the space to future members and visitors.

About Noon I will start a grill, so bring your grillables and we can enjoy our accomplishments and hopefully a wonderful Fall afternoon.

The Y axis is only supported on one side, so the tools will need to be light unless, we can devise another support. At our last open house on Wednesday, we had a great hacker collaboration and not only got the machine to draw with a Sharpie, but trying some engraving with jtbarclay’s blueray burner. Here’s a shot of the engraving in progress.

Additional information can be found on our wiki: 3D Prototyper Project

Twin Cities Maker invites you to visit our booth at the Red Stag Supper Club Block Party, Saturday, Aug. 21, starting at 3 PM. We’ll have our ever popular life-sized Operation game on hand, and TC Maker members will be available to answer questions and talk shop.

The Red Stag Supper club is located at 509 1st Avenue NE in Minneapolis.

Hope to see you there!

If you have an interest in this (either in making projects, speculating wildly on the future of embedded internet, or just listening to us pontificate), stop by and join in!  We’ll probably be getting started at about the usual meeting time of 7pm.

Adam Wolf will be teaching “Bootstrapping your Arduino Abilities” on Thursday, August 26th, 6pm @ HackFactory. If you want to attend, please register via eventbrite http://tcmaker-arduino1.eventbrite.com/. Preregistration is required so we know the number of parts to order. Registration ends on August 18th, and is limited to 8 students.

An Arduino board/chip, and all materials are part of the class fee. We recommend that you have a computer or laptop that you can bring with to program as well.  If not we may have one to share, but it is recommended that you have your own.

http://tcmaker-welding-aug.eventbrite.com/

This month’s Hack Factory Cabaret will be on Tuesday, July 27th at 7pm. This is a series of quick 5 minute talks on various maker/hacker topics and will be FREE to all and FUN so bring your friends.

If you’d like to present a topic at this month’s talk, mail a brief synopsis to mpm at selenic.com.

Today I bring you a little virtual version of Independence Day!

First, I’ve made a high quality synthetic recording of John Phillips Sousa’s Stars and Strips Forever. This was recorded from a midi file and played back using the excellent midi input plugin in XMPlay. I’ve done a lot of work selecting high quality soundfonts and tweaking the real time DSP for this star quality performance. Click the picture below to access this MP3 file:

I think this sounds pretty realistic, but for comparison you can hear Sousa recordings from the real world at dws.org.

My other virtual goody for the day is to point you to the excellent Skyrocket screensaver from Really Slick Screensavers. This screensaver is simply outstanding, but may require a computer with a bit of graphics oomph to run with high quality settings.

From the website:

“The most full-blown fireworks screensaver ever. It has bright lights, smoke trails, clouds that are illuminated by the explosions, sound effects, and plenty of other eye candy. Keyboard commands allow you to launch various types of rockets, pause the movement of the fireworks, and control the camera with the mouse. OpenGL is used for the graphics and OpenAL is used for the sound.”

Click the image below to visit Really Slick Screensavers and grab the Skyrocket screensaver. The author has created a lot of other fantastic screensavers too, so check them out!

For a real virtual blast, try playing the midi file in a loop and running the screensaver at the same time! It’s an out of this world experience!